Cool. Deep.
My 2 pennies, as I’ve created and led a few agencies throughout my life, but never a Bubble one 
Find your niche as narrow as possible.
Client’s type budget, size
even location.
For example, I prefer the Nordics and less Italians, French, just how I interact with them.
It’s even better if it’s an industry or vertical.
I’ve had a translation agency for Digital products that was interested in expanding their products to Russian or Romanian-speaking countries. Had clients like WinZip, McAfee and Google. I narrowed it even more, Online Security products and Online Gambling (it was trendy at that time)
Another one, a BIM agency (building information management), working exclusively with UK, as this vertical has strict Requirements and Standards, so when approaching a client and telling them, we’ll help your company comply with BS 1192 it was an easy sell point.
VR/AR, WordPress, 3d apps were another example, so when I discovered Bubble.io for one of my MVP, I was already sick of this business model. But anyway, when needed to build for money, based on my strength, I also discovered my niche: clients who want to test their ideas, and need a quick MVP V01, max V02.
I had a few 6+months full-time projects, which I didn’t enjoy at all.
Once you have defined your niche, it’s easier to price it, promote, standardise procedures etc.
I have a friend who combined his photography hobby with WordPress knowledge and is 100% into this niche, selling at much higher rates his WordPress niche themes.
Late to the party but this is an incredibly valuable post. Thank you so much for writing it.
I’m very interested to hear you say you could make more just going solo. I’m solo currently and I feel like the only way to scale earnings is to go the agency route and hire. But it’s just like you said: I want to build stuff, not manage people.
Any tips on how to scale solo earnings?
Detach your value and positioning from hours to output.
If you work twice as fast you COULD charge $400/hr, but nobody is going to because they compare you to other hourly rates.
When you charge hourly, you and your skills are treated like a commodity. When you have an offer beyond hours, they value it based on the difference you’ll make.
So you got to Gold status by working primarily on existing apps? If so, that’s very interesting!
We’ve done like two new builds in the last year. We work almost exclusively on existing apps.
The simple fact is that most new apps aren’t successful. Working on existing apps means we only work with apps that are revenue generating and have a significant business need to solve their problems (their business IS Bubble)
Yes, we work only on new apps that have already been funded (non bubble agency)
The other thing that Bubble developers overestimate is a client’s inclination for speed.
Good clients, for the most part, don’t care about speed (for a new build). They’d rather get it right over a couple months than work with an agency that promises a two week turnaround.
So, if your entire positioning is around ‘we build MVP in 3 weeks!’ it’s not really a sell.
What CAN be a sell is the process (which happens to be a specific duration of time) because a process reduces risk and improves perceived chance of success which lets you charge more.
I think it depends the market has different kinds of clients , some want speed fast mvps to get investors or to test their idea then some want a version one they can get to market the pie is big enough for developers to serve each
Sure, I’m just saying that if you sell speed, you’re much less likely to find higher ticket proejcts than if you sell reliability and business outcomes.
Yes I agree
Update time!
Alright, it’s been 5 months, probably time for another reflection update.
Our MRR has doubled again since this (without doubling team size / client numbers).
This went really well. We pay like $800/mo for Linear now. Which is a bit painful, and some people will look at that and be like ‘well why don’t you vibe code an alternative!’. But the reality is that 1. I have better things to spend my time on and 2. the client portal / project management interface is literally our core product. The easier and nicer we can make it to interact with our team, the more our clients enjoy working with us. You don’t need to put a direct monetary value on that - anecdotally, it’ll be worth it.
This all went well, would recommend.
We ended up on Next.js and Convex. This has been great.
This drove a lot of growth for us. Most social content isn’t about giving tips or telling people the answers. Instead, it should be changing how someone thinks. If you make a post that makes someone think ‘he gets it’ or ‘that’s exactly what I’m going through’ then they resonate. They come to your discovery call already ready to join our membership options, and it’s basically just an admin chat.
This is coming verrrrry soon. It’s really really cool. It’s basically all the stuff I want developers to understand so that I can hire them. It’ll be a paid resource (because then you’ll actually make the most of it!).
Hired in-house QA
We made our first in-house QA hire. This has been pretty good as it frees up developers to work on other tasks, and of course reduces bugs hitting prod from our work. Also, as almost all of our clients are existing applications, this lets us do a QA pass on their app and generate a ton of actionable tickets. Again, we want to find work that delivers lots of commercial value, and QA is a useful resource to help do this.
Struggles hiring developers
So our biggest bottleneck by far is hiring good developers. There’s not many of them, and those that are good, already have work. Part of the reason for investing in the education resource mentioned above is that ultimately we’re going to need to train, or at least provide the tools for developers to upskill themselves. I really want to hire people, but I’m only going to hire people that actually deliver value to our clients and don’t require being chased around (both ops was and development wise…). I’d rather turn away that work.
We offer some of the highest pay scales in the ecosystem and I’d like to think it’s the best agency gig a dev here can get. Though I did come to realise that high pay is necessary but not sufficient to attract the best talent. We need something more than that (i.e a culture/mission) to attract people, because ultimately if all we offer is high pay then we’ll just attract Bubble mercenaries that will leave for the next high paying job.
So, what’s that mission? Why does NQU even exist?
NQU exists to be on the side of serious founders - the technical partner who does the right thing and walks alongside them as their business grows.
NQU is the agency serious founders come to when their Bubble app has to work. We’re small enough that every client knows who’s working on their app, and big enough to handle the work that matters. We’re known across the Bubble ecosystem for three things: maintainability, security, and performance. When a serious app has a serious problem in any of those areas, NQU is the first name mentioned.
We don’t chase enterprise work. We work with founders and business operators who care about their businesses the way we do - people who want to get things done and who treat us like partners, not vendors. We make a meaningful difference to their personal lives as a result of our work.
Now I tend to hate that corporate bullshit nonsense but it is helpful to understand what we do / why we do it beyond just ‘we deliver good work’.
Buildprint
I suppose I had to mention it? It’s going pretty well, I suppose.
I’m lucky that I can just build stuff I find interesting and it also happens to be unreasonably useful. What might be another company’s entire SaaS tends to just be leadgen for us. We don’t even get that many leads directly from Buildprint. I just place value on the hard to measure kind of reputation that ultimately rewards us.
Too often people place weight only on investments where the output can be easily measured. e.g with paid ads you know how many leads you get per $ and whether you expect an ROI. You can’t do that with ‘reputation’.
Buildprint costs about $2000/mo to run at the moment. So it’s definitely expensive (as a free product…), but not unsustainable if it gets us more work.
I’ll be continuing to develop it further, because it’s fun! It’s also not putting Bubble developers out of work - it just lets us ship more and get rid of the boring tasks. You have to be a developer to use Buildprint well (just like all AI-assisted coding) so it lets good developers get more leverage.
We’re collaborating with the Bubble team to unblock stuff (e.g logs is currently on waitlist due to constraints on Bubble’s side) and they’re being helpful and want Buildprint to succeed as it benefits the entire community.
Migration work
We’re beginning to offer Bubble to code migration as a service. It’s not because there’s a lack of Bubble work (there really isn’t). Some of our clients are just so successful that they’re at a scale where that does make sense (even without AI!), and they want us to be a partner in that process so we can walk alongside them through the transition.
What comes next?
It’s already going well so I won’t change up too much. We’ll continue to take on more clients, expand the team, though only as much as necessary.
We’ll probably target some larger clients currently working with other large agencies right now that are being held back by them. We monitor progress on a large set of high value apps to identify when they’re having bad work delivered, security issues, etc!. Sometimes they’re not ready to switch even though they need to, but we plant the seed and when they’re ready, they come to us because we have a track record on those app rescues. If they’re a Bubble-to-code candidate, we also want to catch them before they start doing that with the agency because otherwise it’ll be a disaster for them. Fortunately, the large agencies make it fairly easy for us to take their clients
More education resources will be the big one over the next few months. Stay tuned for more there, but NQU Academy is coming.
Hope this helps other freelancers/agency builders!
Particularly happy to see NQU Academy coming.
Congratulations on the growth @georgecollier.
@georgecollier What made you pick Convex over Supabase?
It’s like Bubble, but for code
Focuses on business logic and forces you to build in a way that scales well with their backend. Also like Bubble in that when you want to step out of their paradigm it gets tricky 
@georgecollier Amazing growth. Congratulations 
I had a few questions I wanted to ask:
What skills do you look for in a person besides Bubble?
Should they also know how to use other important tools?
Do they need to know how to code, or at least understand how code works?
Congratulations @georgecollier! You keep compounding wins and building a talented team which is impressive.
As a full-stack/no-code developer myself, I think people seriously underestimate the emotional and mental cost of being “the entire company” for a project.
Being the person who handles sales calls, product strategy, UX, development, debugging, client expectations, deployment, support, timelines, and emergencies at the same time can become extremely overwhelming over time.
At first, it feels empowering. You move fast, you solve problems, clients love the speed. But after months or years, the constant context switching creates a level of emotional stress that many developers never talk about publicly.
You are never truly “off”.
Your brain is always running:
* solving problems
* anticipating failures
* answering clients
* fixing bugs
* thinking about delivery deadlines
And when something goes wrong, there is no team to absorb the pressure. It all lands on one person.
I’m not saying this model doesn’t work — it absolutely can. But I think founders and developers should be careful not to romanticize the “solo superhero developer” idea. Sustainable systems, boundaries, and support matter a lot more than we think.
If this comment helps even one developer feel less alone dealing with burnout and emotional exhaustion, it was worth writing.
Commercial awareness and business sense
No, not really
The people I hire are naturally like this, whether it’s with their work, or something else